The Evening Show (latest images)http://www.eveningshow.com
Astrophotography of Richard S. Wright Jr.Main Blog: Accidental AstronomerBisque Blog: Software BisqueTwitter: @AccidentalAstro Will Code for FoodThu, 17 Aug 2017 19:25:56 -0400Thu, 17 Aug 2017 19:25:56 -0400http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssZenPhoto RSS GeneratorMy Milky Way Selfie (Nightscapes)One of the hardest things to learn in astrophotography is patience. If you're not happy with an image, put it down. Go back to it in a week, in a month. There was something just unsettling about the original version of this, and I went back to it tonight and just spent about 10 minutes playing with it. Much happier now with my self portrait.]]>
Nightscapes
Mon, 07 Aug 2017 23:11:10 -0400Our Cosmic Neighbor (Solar System)

The full moon can be an excellent astrophotography target too, and almost anyone can take a photo like this! An off the shelf DSLR (and an old one at that) captured this in 1/60th of a second @ISO 100 using a 600mm telescope. Good focus, good exposure, and don't get carried away with trying to over sharpen it or over saturate it.

When full, the ray systems around the impact craters are the most prominent, and you often can capture some surface details in the shaded relief along the limb of the moon where the sunlight is just grazing the surface.

Thie first time I saw an image of this region, I thought the colors were fake. There's Orange in there! And Yellow!

Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and most often shot wide field regions in the sky, this nebula complex is located in the constellation (big surprise here) Ophiuchus. This is a vast region of space approximately 460 light years away.

This final image is three hours of stacked 5 minute exposures at ISO 400 with a modified Canon T3i, and a Canon 200mm f/2.8 lens stopped down to f/4 with a circular aperture mask. The images were taken on a cold night at the 2017 Texas Star Party.

A beautiful and larger than expected globular cluster. I love the blue and amber stars and detail captured all the way to the core. Perhaps to date one of my best captures that exhibits some of the powderly diamond quality of a fine globular.

A gorgeous and well known trio of galaxies in the constellation Leo. These three frame up in almost any moderate focal length system and are a frequent favorite of many astrophotographers. My favorite is the one to upper right, the "Hamburger" galaxy.

This gorgeous galaxy in Canes Venatici is around 23 million light years away. It is suspected that a black hole in the center of the galaxy is devouring stars to release large amounts of X-Rays. The field around this galaxy is rich in other more distant galaxies.

This was my last image from the Winter Star Party of 2017. It is NGC2467, also known as the Skull and Crossbones Nebula. It certainly does not look like a skull or crossbones to me, but maybe in an eyepiece.

A friend pointed this object out to me and I decided to shoot it while I was at WSP. It's very southerly, and not often photographed. It is small, this is cropped way down from the original, which was pretty wide field. It needs more focal length and/or smaller pixels I think to do it justice. There was quite a bit more blue than I see in most other images of this on-line, and I had a struggle to keep the Ha (red) from overpowering it, and I've reprocessed this from scratch about 3 times now. Time to give up. I wish now I'd shot some OIII too. Next year I'll spend more time on this fellow.

Down at the Stardust Ranch in Okeechobee country, FL I bring along multiple mounts usually. In the background is the MYT with an 80mm LOMO refractor and I'm runing some tests on a prototype camera.

In the forground I have my other favorite imaging system. The Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 refractor with a new MoonLite NightCrawler focuser and currently mated to an FLI Microline 16200 camera. You can just make out a little red box on top that is the Raspberry Pi running the whole thing. I'm actually running that system from inside my building via an ethernet cable that is run up inside the mount.

Can you tell which direction the camera was facing for this star trail? Bet you can. I call this Southern Trails. This star trail image was made by combining 68 individual 2 minute exposures made on a tripod. Several things interest me about this photo. You can see a very distinct line where the still tidal pool meets the more turbulent deeper waters as the still water makes a better reflection of the star trails. Taken at this years Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys, you can see on the right the red lights along the shore from some of the hundreds of amateur astronomers who gather at this event every year to star gaze under the southern skies. The skies were amazing and the stars go almost all the way to the horizon. The bright streak along the horizon on the left hand side is a passing fishingboat over the course of the hour+ these exposures were gathered.

Cataloged as IC2177, the Seagull nebula is a supernova reminant about three full moon widths wide laying along the boundry between the constellations Monoceros and Canis Major. The majority of the object is about 4,000 light years away and contains numerous features, and has areas of active star formation.

It seems appropriate that the seagull should be captured at the Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys in February 2017.